How surveillance tech erodes your privacy | Jen Golbeck

**Elise Hu** (0:04)
You're listening to TED Talks Daily, where we bring you new ideas to spark your curiosity every day. I'm your host, Elise Hu.
Most of us have heard the warnings about digital privacy. Read the terms of service, watch what you share, be careful what you click. But AI ethicist Jen Golbeck thinks the problem runs a lot deeper.

**Jen Golbeck** (0:23)
On the web, every click, every search, every fraction of a second, eyes linger on a piece of content is recorded, and we're followed across the web into our patient portals at our doctor's office and into forums we thought were private. And what we found is that if technology makes something possible and that something is profitable, companies will do it pretty much regardless of the ethics.

**Elise Hu** (0:47)
Jen, who has spent years mapping the ways governments and corporations extract our data, profit from it, and use it to consolidate power, has a name for this.
Data colonialism. In her talk, she makes the case that it isn't just a tech problem or a privacy problem. It's a threat to democracy itself.

**Jen Golbeck** (1:05)
Data colonialism is fundamentally incompatible with democracy. Because democracy requires that power be held in the hands of the people and that we're governed with our consent.
But under this system, regardless of how our data is used, the surveillance itself undermines core principles of democracy so foundational that we wrote them into the Bill of Rights.

**Elise Hu** (1:27)
But she's here to do more than sound the alarm. She has a plan and it starts closer to home than you might think. It's coming up right after a short break.
And now, our TED Talk of the day.

**Jen Golbeck** (1:48)
There are over 100,000 automated license plate reading cameras in this country. And when you drive past one, they don't just record your license plate, though they do that too. They record the make and model of your car, the color, distinguishing marks like dents and scratches, and even your bumper stickers. So if you were to take your license plate off, they still know that car belongs to you. And when you drive past a camera, the location and the time is recorded in the list of places they know you've been. So if you were to become the victim of a stalker who works in law enforcement, could they use that network to monitor your movements? They can, and they have. If there is a demonstration in your town for gun rights or civil rights, and the government takes an interest, could they use this network to get a list of everyone who drove to or even who drove past that protest? They can, and they have. And if you live in a state where abortion is illegal, and you self-administer one, and your family disapproves, after you fled from them and left the state, can they go to law enforcement and have your movements around the country tracked? They can, and they have. It's one of the thousands of ways that all of our movements are monitored every day. Our cars are recording our acceleration and speed and braking, sharing that with data brokers who sell access to car insurance companies who use it to change our rates. Our phones monitor our interactions, not just with apps, though they do that too, but our movements through physical space, every business we enter, and the identities of people who are nearby.
On the web, every click, every search, every fraction of a second, our eyes linger on a piece of content is recorded, and we're followed across the web, into our patient portals at our doctor's office, and into forums we thought were private. And what we found is that if technology makes something possible, and that something is profitable, companies will do it pretty much regardless of the ethics. And this kind of surveillance pricing is in use on the web for everything from airline tickets to clothes, but now it's following us offline and meeting us in stores.
Companies make billions of dollars a year using data from us that was collected without our permission and that they employ without our consent. But these systems don't exist just for commerce. They exist to build detailed dossiers of our thoughts, habits and actions that can be used to manipulate our behavior or weaponized against us. Data that law enforcement would require a warrant to collect if they did it directly, they now can just go buy for a few dollars from private companies with no court order and no probable cause. The surveillance allows them to circumvent the protections that we have written into law. And I don't know about you, but if this is supposed to be the land of the free, it suddenly doesn't feel like it. We have a name for this kind of system. When the government and corporations go into a place and engage in extraction, taking away private property, resources, land, value, and labor from people, concentrating it for themselves and then using it to keep that system in place, we call it colonialism. In America's days as a British colony may be long over, but we have slid into a new form of colonialism, not at the hands of foreign powers and plantation owners and trading companies, but at the hands of tech companies and government agencies. And this is called data colonialism. The idea of data colonialism describes when governments and corporations extract data from people and use it to generate profits and exert control. And it's a system that we can see in place and in operation every day. For example, Airlines Reporting Corporation is a data broker owned by the major airlines in the US, and they sell our flight records to the government, including to Customs and Border Protection. Clearview AI has built facial recognition technology using images taken from social media and the web without permission, and they sell that facial recognition to immigration officials, including ICE.